Why Bet on Cycling?
Cycling is a hard sport to bet on, let’s make that clear straight away. Let’s face it – you are betting on what is like a 190 runner handicap horse race. Like any sport though, if you know your stuff and do your research you can start to narrow down the field to a more manageable selection process.
Horses for Courses
Like horse racing, there are ‘horses for courses’ when it comes to cyclists. Of course you have your sprinters like Cavendish and Griepel, the ‘puncheurs’ like Gilbert or Chavanel, climbers like Quintana or Contador and your Time Triallists like Froome and Martin. So the key when trying to have a bet on a cycle race is to try to work out the most likely scenario for the race and the likely key protagonists.
Sometimes it is very clearly going to be a sprinters stage and ninety nine times out of a hundred when it looks like being a sprinters stage, it finishes in a sprint. The big sprinters teams ensure that, and any rebel breakaways are usually caught with ease once they decide to reel them in. The harder races to work out are the ones which are not necessarily suited to sprinters or pure climbers – ones where breaks are likely to go and you need to try to figure out who is likely to be in the breaks and back accordingly.
Long shots, big odds.
Although it can be very difficult to pick out a potential winner from any given stage, this is reflected in the odds that can be got on most riders. On wide open stages it can be 10/1 or higher on the ‘favourite’ with odds rapidly rising in to the 20s, 30s, 40s and well up in to the hundreds. So although it is hard to pick winners, spreading small stakes around on riders that are 30/1 and bigger means that when you do pull it off it can be a nice return.
If you are a user of betfair, there is also the possibility to ‘trade’ the price in running. This is great if you have managed to back a rider at a high price like say 50/1, he gets in a break that builds up a 7 minute lead and people are trying to back him in running at say 6/1 or less. You can place an opposite ‘lay’ bet at 7/1, for some, all, or more of your initial stake to get yourself in a position say where you effectively can have a ‘free’ bet with no loss at odds of 43/1. More on this in the ‘Trading’ section.
The other great advantage of betting with betfair is the abililty to bet on a selection to place in the top 3 only, not necessarily to win. So you might really fancy a rider to do well in a race, but think there may be one or two too strong for him, then it might be worth a place bet. An example of this would be when I selected Valverde and Boasson-Hagen to place in the World’s last year, as I expected Gilbert to win it.. They finished 2nd and 3rd to Gilbert, landing my win bet and both place bets.. a beautiful result! You can also with betfair ‘lay’ a rider to place – that is that you think he will not place in the top 3 – very often you can lay fancied riders at very short prices if you don’t think they will finish in the top 3.. For example if you think Contador doesn’t have the legs to stay with the likes of Froome, Rodriguez, Dan Martin and Quintana on a certain mountain stage then you could probably lay him around even money for a top 3 placing. As long as he finishes outside the top 3 you collect your winnings.
The favourites are favourites for a reason.
I may have said earlier that cycling racing is a wide open 190 runner handicap, but in actual fact, in most races there are actually not very many riders who will probably win. For example, when it comes to Time Trials, there are only about 5 or 6 riders likely to win – riders such as Tony Martin, Cancellara (when at his best), Wiggins or Froome would make up about 95% of the probability of the winner. You would probably have an even money favourite followed by someone around 5/2 and then about 5/1 with the rest huge prices.
This also applies to overall betting markets too like the Green Points jersey or the Overall GC winners. For example, in this year’s TDF GC betting market, Chris Froome is 4/5 to win. This is an incredibly short price for such a tough three week tour, but when you go through the remaining candidates, there are actually only about 5-10 riders out of 190 or so that can or could actually win it, barring a major shock. So very often, you can narrow down a field quite well, based on research, race and rider knowledge and form guides. You get to know which riders like what types of courses. Which riders are likely to be in an early breakaway that may stay away. Which riders are suffering fatigue, illness or are really up for a stage as it passes near their home town etc. These sorts of factors all need to be weighed up before you make your bets.